By: Sara Kovač / Nova24tv
The Social Democrats party (SD) has still not answered one very simple question: how much did they pay for the Moskovič villa, which once belonged to the Jewish merchant Felix Moskovič and was later acquired by the League of Communists through an exchange contract. The Constitutional Court had ruled that the property of the League of Communists cannot become the property of its successor, the Party of Democratic Renewal – the current Social Democrats. But court decisions clearly do not apply to first-class citizens. The Social Democrats became the owners of the villa – in spite of everything.
Following the decision made by the Velenje District Court, where lots of Social Democrats’ supporters work, the victorious celebrating of Social Democrats was short-lived, as information about the extremely unusual court proceedings in this case came to light. Namely, Prime Minister Janez Janša did not receive the lawsuit nor the ruling in the mail. At the moment, it seems that this is just another construct of the court, which is more loyal to the SD party than it is to the Constitution and the law.
The court proceedings are not yet final and will continue at a higher level. However, the court brought attention to an additional issue with its judgment, which will help establish the facts and bring about the final ruling. How much did the SD party pay for the villa, where their headquarters are located to this day? Our editorial office also addressed this question to the Social Democrats, but we have not received an explanation yet.
The Jewish Association is asking for clarification
The European Jewish Association also believes that the Social Democrats are residing in a stolen villa. As we have already reported, the chairman of the Association, Rabbi Menachem Margolin, wrote to Tanja Fajon in spring of this year and told her that the villa on Levstikova Street 15 in Ljubljana, where the SD party’s headquarters are now located, was owned by Felix Moskovič until 1943, but during World War II, he and his family were taken to concentration camps where they died, along with millions of other Jews. Margolin added that after their deaths, the property was sold under questionable conditions, nationalised, and then used by the communist party in the former Yugoslavia.
But even if the purchase of Moskovič’s villa is legally and formally “clean” and even if it is perhaps also written in the archives that the takeover of the premises of the former Banovina Savings Bank was carried out in a seemingly lawful manner, all the deals that people made with Yugoslavia after 1945, are controversial in one way or another, as Marko Štrovs already pointed out years ago. “People were being pressured; they had to sell their real estate to the state below market value; otherwise, they would have been forcefully evicted. However, it is almost impossible to determine what the real costs would be, even in the case of Moskovič’s villa,” he said. The history of the former Jewish villa, in which the SD party is based today, is best known to Renato Podberšič, who was a member of the commission under the leadership of former minister Lovro Šturm, which investigated the Communist party’s malversations in the post-war period.
After the Germans killed practically the entire Moskovič family in Auschwitz in November 1946, the District Court in Ljubljana confiscated the entire property of the Moskovič family on the basis of Article 2 of the Act on the Transfer of Enemy Property to State Ownership and on Sequestration of Property of Absent Persons (Official Gazette of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, No. 63/46) and ordered the entry of the confiscation procedings in the land register. Podberšič further explained that the murdered Felix Moskovič was accused by the communist authorities of collaborating with the Gestapo (!), on the basis of which his entire property, which was listed and assessed in December 1946, was confiscated. At that same time, Ignjat Lajtner, brother of the late Klara Moskovič, was told to represent the absent convict in the confiscation proceedings. Lajtner proposed that the confiscation be lifted and that the property be assigned to him for temporary administration.
In May 1947, the district court awarded the legacy of Felix and Klara Moskovič to Ignjat Lajtner, the brother of the latter, who was also signed into the land register as the owner. In 1948, the presidency of the government of the People’s Republic of Slovenia demanded 600,000 dinars (the then-currency) from Lajtner, as a refund of the bills paid for the renovation works at the villa at Levstikova Street 31 (which happened during the time the villa was confiscated), which Podberšič wrote about in a January article on the Časnik.si web portal. In 1949, the value of the villa was re-evaluated at the request of the District People’s Committee IV., and this time, it was assessed with a lower value. Immediately after the probate hearing (which was held on the 21st of February 1947), Ignjat Lajtner sold the property to Dani Kos for 800,000 dinars.
In May of 1961, Dana Kos then sold the villa (the land without the building was registered as social property in 1960) for 12,810,030 dinars to the general public property, and the villa was then managed by the Administration of Buildings of Offices and Institutions of the People’s Republic of Slovenia in Ljubljana. In 1982, on the basis of Article 5 of the Act on Registration of Socially Owned Real Estate, the holder of the right of use of the villa, the Socialist Republic of Slovenia, was entered in the land register.
The exchange contract was signed despite a different decision of the court
However, if in 1990, there was an agreement banning the alienation and sale of real-estate of former socio-political organisations; in 1992, the Party of Democratic Renewal violated this agreement when it entered Drnovšek’s government and tried to register the villa in the land register as if they own it. The court rejected the motion, the Party of Democratic Renewal then appealed, and the court agreed with the party’s request. Thus, the last ruling happened on the 25th of May, 1993. But about two months earlier, on the 16th of March 1993, the Party of Democratic Renewal signed an Exchange and Gift Agreement with the government, represented by Drnovšek’s Secretary-General Mirko Bandelj, and had already acted as the owner of the villa in this agreement. Nevertheless, they were successful in replacing the so-called Moskovič villa at Levstikova Street 15 and their business premises on Slovenska Street 9.
The Social Democrats, the second-largest opposition party, lost a dispute in the Nova Gorica District Court three years ago and had to return 800 square meters of the building, which the locals call Kremelj, to the municipality. The Constitutional Court has already made it clear that they should obviously also return all the remaining properties, which they “inherited” as the self-proclaimed successors of the League of Communists.
The Constitutional Court judges wrote the following even before the signing of the exchange contract regarding the takeover of the property of the former League of Communists: “Social assets, which were managed by a socio-political organisation, did not become its property. The Law on Political Association does not include such provisions on the transformation of social property into the property of political organisations.”